Subway Art: LA's Hidden Treasure
Somewhere beneath Westwood, Wilshire Boulevard, and the blocks surrounding Rodeo Drive, construction crews are finishing tunnels for one of the most significant transit projects in the history of Los Angeles. They are also, though far fewer people know this, finishing something else entirely: a permanent public art collection that rivals the quality of work inside the city's great museums.
The Metro Art program has commissioned 26 artists to create site-specific, integrated artworks across seven new stations on the D Line subway extension. These are not decorative murals tacked onto finished walls. They are works conceived, designed, and built into the architecture itself, meaning that every person who rides the subway in Los Angeles will pass through permanent galleries for the rest of their lives without paying an admission fee or making a reservation.
This week, five of those commissioned artists opened their creative process to the public in a way that almost never happens at this scale. The Hammer Museum in Westwood hosted an Art Lab event in partnership with Metro Art, bringing together Sandow Birk, Iris Yirei Hu, Yunhee Min, and the collaborative duo Victoria Fu and Matt Rich for a free, all-ages workshop where attendees could make art alongside the artists creating works for the future Westwood/UCLA and Westwood/VA Hospital stations.
The event invited the public to explore the artists' creative process through hands-on, art-making activities connected to their site-specific artworks for the future D Line Subway Extension Project Section 3 stations serving UCLA, Westwood Village, the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, and beyond.
For Angelenos who care about art, transit, and the future of their city, this workshop was a rare window into a project that is still underground in more ways than one.
A 9-Mile Underground Art Collection
Before going into the individual artists, it is worth stopping to absorb what is actually being built here, because the numbers are genuinely extraordinary.
The D Line extension adds 9 miles of track and seven new stations, connecting Downtown Los Angeles to Westwood at a total projected cost approaching $9.5 billion. It is being built in three phases. The first segment from Wilshire/Western to Wilshire/La Cienega stations opens on May 8, 2026, bookending the Miracle Mile with new stops adjacent to LACMA, the La Brea Tar Pits, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and the Petersen Automotive Museum.
Section 2, spanning 2.6 miles with stations at Beverly Drive and Century City, is approximately 83 percent complete and targeted to open in spring 2027. Section 3, covering 2.5 miles to the Westwood/UCLA and Westwood/VA Hospital stations, is about 75 percent complete and targeted for fall 2027.
When fully open, Metro projects the line will carry approximately 78,000 daily riders, with a direct Westwood-to-Downtown trip taking about 25 minutes.
A total of 26 artists have been commissioned to create site-specific, integrated artworks across the extension's seven stations, selected through an open, competitive process following the recommendation of a panel of nationally recognized curators, local arts professionals, and community members. That selection panel included the Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, an Associate Curator from the Skirball Cultural Center, Getty Research Institute curators, and senior figures from the United Talent Agency Artist Space and Creative Artists Agency. This was not an administrative committee picking safe choices. It was a genuine curatorial process conducted at a high level.
"The stations are filled with beautiful artwork making the journey to one's destination an experience in itself," said Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins.
Iris Yirei Hu: Mosaic and Memory
Of the five artists at the Hammer workshop, Iris Yirei Hu may have the most quietly radical approach to what subway art can be.
LA Metro commissioned Iris Yirei Hu to design a large-scale mosaic artwork for the future UCLA/Westwood Purple Line Metro Station slated to open for the 2028 Summer Olympics. Her titles alone signal the register she is working in. Her three works planned for the station are titled "The Wise Woman, She Calls Us into the Sun," "Hug the Water," and "An Intoxication of You, My Third Eye Seeps."
Iris Yirei Hu is a journey-based artist from Los Angeles who roots her practice in processes of material and spiritual transformation, creating labor-intensive pieces and installations that explore the subterranean realms of grief and loss, cycles of life and death, the earthly and the otherworldly, and the infinitely evolving self.
That language—grief, cycles, the subterranean—maps directly onto the physical experience of descending into a subway station. There is something inherently liminal about going underground, stepping into an enclosed space that moves you through the city without letting you see it. Hu's work, designed for a station directly beneath a major research university with roots in Pacific Islander and Asian American communities and near what will be the Olympic athlete village in 2028, engages that liminality as subject matter rather than ignoring it.
Central to her practice is learning from and working across territories and peoples, investigating how geography, kinship, and the sacred are reflected in cultural technologies and ecological practices. Her work probes the sentience in the natural world and the vulnerability in human connection across cultural, geographic, and generational differences.
For a city as geographically diverse and as culturally layered as Los Angeles, having a mosaic artist who thinks this carefully about territory and kinship working on the station that will serve a university campus is a meaningful alignment of artist and place.
Sandow Birk: History Panels at the VA Hospital Station
Sandow Birk is one of the most prominent artists working in Los Angeles today, with a practice rooted in social commentary, historical revision, and the specific textures of Southern California life. His placement at the Westwood/VA Hospital Station is not accidental.
Birk's works for the station are titled "A Panorama of LA" and "History of the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers," both currently in progress.
The Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, now the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, has a history stretching back to 1887. It was established as a sanctuary for Civil War veterans and has served American soldiers across every major conflict since. The land it sits on has been subject to legal battles over veteran housing for decades. Birk, whose previous work has consistently engaged American history with critical intelligence and formal daring, is the right artist to create the permanent visual text for a station serving this institution.
Birk earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Otis Art Institute and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and a Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant. His work is held in the collections of LACMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museum, and international institutions in Italy and Germany.
The "Panorama of LA" title speaks to another dimension of Birk's practice: his long engagement with the visual tradition of the panoramic painting and with Los Angeles as a subject that resists being seen whole. A panorama placed underground, on the walls of a subway station where you move past it, offers a fundamentally different relationship between viewer and cityscape than a panorama hung in a gallery. You do not stand in front of it. You pass through it.
Yunhee Min: Color and Cultural Identity
Yunhee Min's artwork is grounded in the idea that cultural institutions create a sense of shared identity and community. That framing is particularly resonant for the Westwood/UCLA station, which will serve not only the university but also the dense residential and commercial communities of Westwood Village and the neighborhoods to the south and west.
Min is a painter working in large-scale abstraction, and her translation of that practice into the architectural context of a subway station is one of the more intellectually interesting design challenges in the entire D Line art program. Abstract painting, by its nature, does not illustrate a specific place or tell a specific story. It creates an environment, a quality of attention, a visual atmosphere that conditions how you feel and think while you are inside it.
Designing that atmosphere for a transit station where tens of thousands of people will pass each day, in a hurry, with varying levels of attention available, requires thinking about how abstraction functions at a physical and temporal scale very different from a gallery wall. The workshop at the Hammer gave participants a direct look at how Min approaches that translation, and how she thinks about color and form as social infrastructure rather than personal expression.
Victoria Fu and Matt Rich: A Collaborative Vision
The inclusion of a collaborative duo in the D Line art program is itself notable. Victoria Fu and Matt Rich have distinct individual practices that come together in a mode of working that produces outcomes neither would arrive at alone.
Victoria Fu and Matt Rich are both commissioned for the Westwood/VA Hospital Station. Their placement at the same station as Sandow Birk creates a richly layered environment where multiple artists with different practices and visual languages inhabit the same architectural space, contributing to a total experience that cannot be attributed to any single sensibility.
Fu's work has engaged questions of representation, screen culture, and the relationship between filmed image and physical surface. Rich's practice has centered on painting, color theory, and the spatial dynamics of abstract form. The intersection of those two approaches in a public art context, built into the floors, walls, and ceilings of an underground station, is the kind of genuinely experimental program decision that most public art commissions do not have the courage to make.
The Hammer workshop's hands-on activities allowed participants to engage with the creative processes of all five artists, experiencing the texture of the thinking behind each commission rather than just the polished final concepts. For a city that talks about art constantly but rarely gets inside the making of it, that access represents exactly what the best public-private arts partnerships can do.
Section 1 Stations: A Sneak Peek
The art program at the three Section 1 stations opening on May 8 gives Los Angeles its first tangible look at what the full D Line art collection will feel like in person.
The three stations, Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and Wilshire/La Cienega, each include integrated artworks commissioned by Metro Art. The museum-quality works are prominent and bold, found at the street, concourse, and platform levels of each station. The intent is to transform infrastructure into welcoming, thoughtfully designed spaces, delivering riders to the doorstep of some of LA's most iconic arts and cultural destinations.
Among the Section 1 artists, Todd Gray's work "Mining the Archive" is at the Wilshire/Fairfax station, steps from LACMA and the La Brea Tar Pits. Eamon Ore-Giron's "Infinite Landscape: Los Angeles Para Siempre" and Ken Gonzales-Day's "Urban Excavation" bring Indigenous history, the diversity of the city's collection of cultural artifacts, and the long arc of Los Angeles settlement into the visual field of riders passing through the Miracle Mile.
These works are already installed. They will be visible from day one of service. And every person who rides the D Line from Koreatown to Beverly Hills after May 8 will enter what is effectively a new branch of the Los Angeles public art collection without paying anything beyond their transit fare.
The Olympics and Public Art
The connection between the D Line art program and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is direct and significant.
The Westwood/UCLA station is slated to serve the 2028 Olympic athlete village, with Metro projecting the full extension will be operational roughly six months before the July 2028 Olympics opening ceremony. That timeline means the stations at Westwood/UCLA and Westwood/VA Hospital, including all of the artworks by Iris Yirei Hu, Yunhee Min, Sandow Birk, and Victoria Fu and Matt Rich, will be complete and in service before the world arrives in Los Angeles for the Games.
For a city that has invested enormously in presenting itself as a cultural capital capable of hosting the Olympics on its own terms, having a subway station serving the athlete village that doubles as a permanent public art gallery is a genuinely powerful statement. Athletes and visitors from every country in the world will descend into those tunnels and emerge into a visual environment created by Los Angeles artists, about Los Angeles history and community, embedded permanently into Los Angeles infrastructure.
That is a different kind of cultural legacy than a stadium or an opening ceremony. It stays. It is free. It belongs to everyone who uses the system for the rest of time.
Engaging with Metro Art Now
For Angelenos who want to engage with this project before the new stations open, the Metro Art program offers ongoing ways to connect.
The D Line Section 1 opening on May 8, 2026, is the most immediate opportunity. The three new stations at Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and Wilshire/La Cienega will all be publicly accessible from day one, and the art installations are designed to reward multiple visits as you notice different elements each time.
Metro Art also runs docent-led art tours along existing Metro lines, which are a genuinely excellent introduction to the scope and quality of the program before the D Line extension stations open. Metro Buses 1, 20, and 720 stop within walking distance of the Hammer Museum, making future Metro Art events at that venue easily accessible by transit from across the Westside and Mid-City.
To stay informed about future workshops, exhibitions, and community events tied to the D Line Extension art program, you can sign up for the Metro Art email list at art.metro.net. The program also maintains active social media accounts where behind-the-scenes content about the commissioned artworks is shared regularly.
The City Underneath the City
There is a version of Los Angeles that most Angelenos never see because it requires going underground. The freeway, the parking lot, the drive-through window, the curbside pickup: the city has organized so much of its daily life around the car that the experience of being below street level, moving through space without traffic, has remained foreign to a majority of residents even as the subway system has expanded significantly over the past decade.
The D Line extension is the most ambitious attempt in the city's history to change that relationship. And embedded within that infrastructure, at every station from Wilshire/La Brea through Westwood/VA Hospital, are the permanent, physical records of what Los Angeles's artistic community believed was worth making visible underground.
Sandow Birk's panorama of the city. Iris Yirei Hu's mosaics about grief and light and the subterranean. Yunhee Min's abstraction about shared cultural identity. Victoria Fu and Matt Rich's collaborative vision at the station serving veterans. These are not decorations. They are arguments about what this city is and who it belongs to, made permanent in tile and ceramic and paint and light, in stations that will outlast every one of the artists who made them.
The Hammer workshop gave a room full of Angelenos a chance to make something with their own hands alongside the people building that underground world. For a city still figuring out how to know itself, that is a significant act.
The D Line subway extension Section 1 opens to the public on May 8, 2026. For information on Metro Art docent tours and upcoming community events, visit art.metro.net. Sign up for Metro Art email updates to be the first to know about future workshops and exhibitions tied to the Section 3 stations at Westwood/UCLA and Westwood/VA Hospital.
